A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like “in Minecraft”) and comments containing it will be removed.

Image depicts the aftermath of a Saudi airstrike on a crowded market in Taiz, Yemen, in which dozens were killed and injured. Since the Saudis reignited the war in July, 270 civilians have been killed and 640 injured in Yemen due to Saudi strikes.


My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

preamble

As we’re all aware, the Republicans losing major ground in the midterms is relatively insignificant in the wider geopolitical sense. While many voters cited their dissatisfaction with the Iran War as a critical motivator for coming out to the polls (not out of any humanitarian impulse, but because, gasp, a foreign war is actually impacting them), the Democrats not only won’t do anything substantially different - they haven’t even pretended to promise to do so. They’ve merely been thrust into a position of power under the assumption that the Blue Team must, by definition, do the opposite of what the Red Team is doing. The situation inside the Zionist entity is relatively similar - Netanyahu and his government is outgoing, but replaced with a government that shares most of the preceding government’s ideology where it most matters. While some Iranian officials (including Araghchi) have attempted to pander to the idea that American voters have ‘voted to stop the war’ and that the US government would be betraying its base by continuing, the view by the current Khamenei seems to be more lucid, and I thankfully don’t get the sense that Iran has lowered its guard by a single iota.

What comes next in the war is now difficult to fathom. Any prediction of an immediate post-midterms strike has obviously not come true, which could be due to a combination of: such threats were always just a bluff; the Trump administration being in turmoil as it self-purges non-believers; and/or a simple lack of readiness (the third aircraft carrier, which may or may not be replacing one of the existing aircraft carriers, is still inbound to the region). Nonetheless, there are still signs that the US is trying once again to shape the battlefield. Over the last few days, there have been several - albeit limited - strikes on Iranian military equipment, particularly on Qeshm Island, as Iran brings down drone after drone and strikes tanker after tanker. They’re also meekly attempting to put the screws on land routes into Iran, but this isn’t really a viable strategy. Trying to outright stop trade between Iraq and Iran will only ignite a firestorm there with the myriad resistance groups. Meanwhile, Pakistan is critically reliant on Iranian fossil fuels and is already in an unstable situation. And finally, Russia has zero motivation to accede to US demands and stop their growing trade with Iran over the Caspian Sea.

To do a lightning round on geopolitical news: Ansarallah recently rejected a Saudi offer of 1 billion dollars to end the war, which is a lowball so insulting that Ansarallah responded by sending drones and missiles into, among other places, the Saudi Aramco HQ (and the widely distributed claim that Ansarallah demanded $51 billion doesn’t seem to be real, as far as I can discern?). Russia has been hammering Ukrainian infrastructure in a few large waves of missiles and drones, exacerbating water and power outages; Russia has also been gradually getting its Starlink competitor, Rassvet, in the sky. China held its Fifth Plenum in late October (for those unaware, there are seven plenums over each National Congress period, and each National Congress lasts five years), and this plenum was notable for having an abnormally high number of absences (~25%) - which, from what I can gather, is mostly due to purges, though it’s always hard to sift through the layers of propaganda - as Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive continues. Over the last few months, Algeria and the Alliance of Sahel States have buried the hatchet on their former misgivings and are now significantly cooperating in both the economic sphere (with new oil infrastructure being constructed in Niger) as well as militarily. Paraguay’s right-wing president, Santiago Peña, has been ousted due to the collapse of Ueno Bank - which about 2/3 of the population used - and into which his government funneled hundreds of millions of dollars. And France held a general strike involving 1.6 million people on November 5th, as anger against Macron’s feckless political, social, and economic governance continues to build. I’ll stop here or I’ll never get this megathread out.


Last week’s thread is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA reports on the Zionists’ destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.

Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:

Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.


  • someone [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    21 hours ago

    The Starship booster crash is really interesting. I’m thinking more and more that it was a test of propellant mass load rather than a hardware failure.

    It seemed okay for the hover very briefly. It hovered vertical at about the right height for a tower catch. Afterwards the moment of green exhaust and the implosion at the lower section were really interesting. The two booster propellant tanks are oxygen (top) and methane (bottom). Green exhaust after a launch typically happens when an engine with copper parts is starved of fuel (methane for Starship) and the oxidizer (oxygen for Starship) goes looking for copper to burn. A green flash just before launch is usually for rockets with TEA-TEB chemical igniters, like a Falcon 9, so that doesn’t apply here, Starship uses spark igniters.

    The implosion started right above the engines in the methane tank section. Starship propellant tanks are planned to use autogenous pressurization to keep propellant flowing and the whole structure rigid. With this type of system, some of the liquid propellant is allowed to boil, and this boiled gaseous propellant keeps the whole tank pressurized and forces liquid propellant into the propellant pump system at the bottom. Excess boiled propellant is vented to keep the pressurization stable. Many other rocket designs use helium for pressurization because it’s the safest possible choice, it’s inert and it can’t freeze under the conditions on a rocket. Early Starship flights used helium pressurization to simplify the R&D. I don’t know if they’ve switched the newer R&D launches to the autogenous system but I think they have. Starship is planned for autogenous tanks because you can’t reload helium on Mars.

    I wonder if they were experimenting with the minimum amount of propellant they could get away with for launch, and when coming back to the launch site for the tower catch found that they didn’t have the fuel reserve they wanted for safety. Reducing propellant load would increase the available mass for payload to orbit. It may be counterintuitive but that’s really how the “tyranny of the rocket equation” works. If they miscalculated the amount of fuel needed for landing it could have starved the rocket of fuel for both tank pressurization (the implosion) and engines (the green exhaust from the oxidizer eating copper engine parts). It’s very in-character for SpaceX to experiment in this way with hardware if it doesn’t affect a mission otherwise and if they don’t plan on reusing that hardware. The lack of a major fireball on impact is a good indicator that there was barely any fuel left on board.

    Edit: They successfully did the tower catch of the prototype ship launched on that booster on their first attempt. (Insert my usual caveat of respect for SpaceX accomplishments strictly being for the scientists, engineers, and technicians and not the know-nothing shithead who owns most of the company. I’m hoping that the success drives space agencies around the world to do their own fully-reusable launch systems now that both a booster catch (on two previous test flights) and the ship catch today demonstrates that it’s possible.